Doctor Fell, OC, Inthebar
"As I was going to Saint Ives..."
One has to keep one's sanity somehow. The man who goes by Doctor Fell picked his a long time ago. Or maybe he hasn't picked it yet. He stopped trying to keep track of such things a long time ago.
"I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks"
He's reasonably sure that he hasn't been born yet, but a lifetime of playing the Great Game through the web of time itself has left him with few other certainties. When he first set out it was to preserve the world he'd been born into, to ensure that history stayed in the books where it belonged. If only it were truly that simple.
"And every sack had seven cats, and every cat had seven kits."
The damnable thing about time travel was, the work was never done. Could never be done. You might set things right according to your history books once, but there was nothing to stop some other agent from coming along later and setting things right according to books, which probably said something altogether different from yours. Oh, a sort of uneasy peace around major events, yes, no sounding the alarm at Pearl Harbor or bursting into Ford's Theater, but the details, the minor events...those would never be still.
And that was just the Naturalists. Mithra only knew what the Romantics would dream up next, and how long it would be before those dreams started coming back down the timestream.
Fell considers his own Classicism the only alternative to screaming madness.
"Man, sacks, cats, kits, and wives..."
And now, instead of the place his calculations should have led him to, he's stepped into a busy bar. One which seems to stand outside the Web itself, stranding him there. Fell looks around in wonder.
"But was I really going to Saint Ives?"
One has to keep one's sanity somehow. The man who goes by Doctor Fell picked his a long time ago. Or maybe he hasn't picked it yet. He stopped trying to keep track of such things a long time ago.
"I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks"
He's reasonably sure that he hasn't been born yet, but a lifetime of playing the Great Game through the web of time itself has left him with few other certainties. When he first set out it was to preserve the world he'd been born into, to ensure that history stayed in the books where it belonged. If only it were truly that simple.
"And every sack had seven cats, and every cat had seven kits."
The damnable thing about time travel was, the work was never done. Could never be done. You might set things right according to your history books once, but there was nothing to stop some other agent from coming along later and setting things right according to books, which probably said something altogether different from yours. Oh, a sort of uneasy peace around major events, yes, no sounding the alarm at Pearl Harbor or bursting into Ford's Theater, but the details, the minor events...those would never be still.
And that was just the Naturalists. Mithra only knew what the Romantics would dream up next, and how long it would be before those dreams started coming back down the timestream.
Fell considers his own Classicism the only alternative to screaming madness.
"Man, sacks, cats, kits, and wives..."
And now, instead of the place his calculations should have led him to, he's stepped into a busy bar. One which seems to stand outside the Web itself, stranding him there. Fell looks around in wonder.
"But was I really going to Saint Ives?"